TechBits

Posted: September 23, 2012 - 12:18am

TechBits

NEW YORK

“Kinect Sesame Street TV,” released Tuesday, is not exactly a video game, though it runs on the Xbox 360. Grover will count coconuts you’ve thrown, the Count will praise you for standing still and Elmo will catch a talking ball if you throw it to him.

The episodes presage the next step in the evolution of TV, adding an interactive element to what’s still a passive, lean-back experience. As you watch kids playing the “Sesame Street” game, it’s easy to imagine a not-so-distant future where viewers become participants, affecting a show’s outcome —much more than they do when they vote for “American Idol” contestants.

“Kinect Sesame Street” ‘’allows the child to participate in the narrative plot,” says Emory Woodard, communications professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. Woodard, who worked at Children’s Television Workshop — what is now Sesame Workshop — in 1995, notes that a lot of TV programming aimed at preschoolers involves characters talking to the kids. “But in this case,” he adds, “The characters can react to the child’s response.”

WASHINGTON

Congress unveiled a new search engine Wednesday to help politicos, lobbyists, researchers, students and any other interested citizens find legislation working its way through the House and Senate to become new laws.

The Library of Congress says the new website Congress.gov is in beta form and will eventually replace the THOMAS legislative search system after a year of fine-tuning the new system.

The new site is more like Google, with one box to search all data. It can filter search results like a shopping site with categories of merchandise. In this case, it can narrow search results by year, by subject, by House or Senate or other factors.

Congress.gov also is mobile friendly for Capitol Hill staffers glued to their Blackberries. It was built with responsive design technology to automatically rearrange a search screen to fit on a smartphone.

This is Congress’ first new search engine since THOMAS was launched in 1995 after just three weeks of development when the Internet was in its infancy.

THOMAS, named for Thomas Jefferson, gets 10 million visits each year. But the library found many users outside the political world didn’t know what THOMAS was. The 17-year-old search system became slow and outdated, and it required insider knowledge to navigate.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

At the beginning of “Borderlands 2” (2K Games, for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, $59.99), you’ve been left for dead on this godforsaken planet. Fortunately, Claptrap, the chatty robot from the original “Borderlands,” comes to your rescue and nurses you back into fighting trim. The bad news: You cannot escape. The good news: There are so many guns lying around Pandora you can dish out way more pain than you can take.

2K is advertising “Borderlands 2” as “a new era of shoot and loot,” and that’s the core of its gameplay. You fire off all your ammo, scavenge loot from the corpses and use it to buy deadlier weapons. It’s an insidiously addictive cycle, but Gearbox wasn’t content to let the series stand on that alone. With an expansive world, memorable characters and clever mission design, “Borderlands 2” elevates its franchise into one of the premium attractions in the video-game universe. Three and a half stars out of four.